"Working? What's the point?"

My H did find, when he got made redundant, that foreign workers were getting the jobs because they could afford to work for less, often their bills are lower because there are quite a few of them living in one house but I do believe there is work out there, he got a job after about 8 weeks, you just have to stick with it and keep looking. Having said that i'm not sure that other areas have so many jobs going.

I used to hang around with a group of girls, their father had hardly ever worked, their mother worked in a factory. They didn't want to work or rather chose not to, they just wanted to collect their benefits each week. They now both have a couple of children each and still don't work. I'm not saying all people are like that but I do believe, having seen it, that some just choose not to and would rather 'sponge'.

I wondered why the girl didn't finish her college course?

It did seem like they would be marginally better off financially if they did work, but that it wasn't enough for them to justify the getting out of bed/going to work amount of effort needed.

Also I was amazed that they got money for phone top ups, but I guess that could be related to helping them find work - how do you get in touch with people if you have no phone?

Jobcentres provide free phones - at least ours does.

Having read the article, I do have a lot of sympathy with them. It's difficult to see what options are available for people with no traditional qualifications. I think a lot of the problems are caused by sub-contracting rather than large organisations employing their own staff for manual labour - these outfits treat their staff as very dispensible, and I wouldn't be particularly surprised if some of them are paying immigrant workers less than minimum wage. This kind of practice would be harder to get away with for a more "visible" large company.

I also think it brings it home how expensive it is to be poor - PAYG phones are more expensive for anyone but the lightest user, but in this situation you wouldn't be able to get a contract or pay for a landline to be set up.

I'm shocked at this. AFAIK mobiles can recieve calls even if they don't have credit. And what is to stop people using the "free" credit on personal texts / calls anyway?

I think that some people will always find an excuse to not work and claim benefits. And I don't think there will ever be a way to stop it from happening.

To my mind, their issues started seriously when they left school at 16 without qualifications, and from growing up in an area with generations of the mass unemployed...

I mean, their unemployment isn't not about "not giving young people a chance" its about over 50% of the population now having a degree and not enough graduate positions around so employers can pick and choose who they want. And even if it's a minimum wage, junior, starter role, you'd rather have someone who's managed to get even a few GCSEs than someone who didn't.

I have sympathy for them because I don't think they'll get out of the situation they are in without a great deal of help and blaming immigrants is easier than getting skills and qualifications and a job.

I'm a bit on the fence here. They do seem very "the worlds against us, boo hoo" and I suspect they didn't have much encouragement to take school seriously. But nothing will change unless they actively make it change.

There is a lot of help available to young people who want to improve their education, at the last FE college I attended you could do a course for £20 if you were on benefits (I paid £800 for the same course) and training for jobs in the NHS for example, are usually subsidised, and even have grants available.

I think they really need someone to show them some direction, show them what they can do and how they can get there. Personally I'd always work even if I was earning the same or marginally more than I would on benefits, but thats because I am pretty terrified of being unemployed.

you have to pay to pick up voicemaisl though on PAYG.

The expenses involved in finding work can be extremely tough. When MrH was unemployed he was not entitled to JS and sometimes we'd scrape together £6 for a travelcard for him to go to an interview, and he'd get there and they person interviewing wouldn't turn up, or not know anything about the interview- it was incredibly frustrating.

I think the problem is that it far too easy to get benefits. Want needs to happen is a severe overhaul of the benefirts system. Either increase the national minimum wage so that working means your actually better off or decrease the amount of benefits you get. I know put that way it's a very simplistic way at looking at things, but if your better off not working because the minimum wage doesn;t cover all your outgoings then something is seriously wrong.

I do think that when you grow up in that kind of household/community it is very difficult to break free from the cycle of living on benefits. I have worked at the Jobcentre, and with homeless families and with young people in a deprived area and saw many many people in this type of situation. Many young people grow up seeing their role models staying at home claiming benefits (and I've seen several dodgy DLA/IB claimants in my time too who know how to play the system). They don't see school or education as being relevant. They play truant or they cause trouble at school and get frequently excluded, or they just fail to reach the standard to pass any qualifications. I was shocked at the number of 15 yr olds I saw whose literacy levels were lower than my 9 yr old son's (and he's not a big writer). Some of them could barely write their own names and addresses!

I am really not sure how you start getting through to these young people and making them see that there is a different way to live and that they could achieve if they wanted to. Until they can see the benefits of staying on at school, getting and education and working for a living then they will just carry on following the example of their families/friends. It is true there are very very few jobs out there for the totally unqualifies/unskilled and inexperienced. The jobs that are available are often temprary and/or minimum wage, or involve gang labour etc. I think may employers also choose to employ immigrant workers because on the whole, from what I know, they tend to work harder and be more reliable & motivated! Many of the young people I knew would just not turn up for work, would turn up late or just skive off as much as possible when they're there which often leads to them being laid off again - they just lacked any kind of work ethic.

It's also true that if all you can get is a minimum wage job, there is very little incentive to work because you'd probably be about as well off on benefits as you get housing benefit, council tax benefit etc etc. Once you're working you have to cover these costs yourself, plus there's the cost of getting to work and back, having to buy appropriate clothes for work, childcare (though some people get help with this).

I agree with what Hyacinth say's there is a lot of financial help with training at local colleges. I have spent the last three and a half years training to becoame a counsellor and it will have cost me around £7,000 pounds in course fees, personal counselling and supervision. I gave up full time work in september 2007 to commit to my diploma course because of placement commitments etc that again go with the course, which was my choice and I have the desire and drive to succeed and will hopefully qualify in june this year, enabling me to set up in private practise soon after.

I see it as two years out of my life where we have financially been strapped, my husband as been off work since march last year on reduced pay as he was diagnosed with cancer and we have just had to start receiving benefits due to his company sick pay ending, but i am still going and I am struggling to find the last thousand pounds for my course fees, when others on my course are getting it paid for.

2 of these people on my course, I believe are only there to keep them on benefits, showing that they are re-training, even though they have not fulfilled half of the course requirements and therefore won't qualify but they'll still get their benefits! One of these two have been deferring the course for 6 years and still contributes nothing to the course. In the last few months this has wound me up but having thought about it, I realised I am wasting energy on these drop outs! I figured it's not my problem to worry about anymore because I will be the one who qualifies and can look back on this time with a real sense of achievement. This person has also been on benefits for most of their life and seems proud of it!

I do believe it's a state of mind that makes you want to work and succeed!

Not only are people terrified of being unemployed, there is also a pride element to this. You are entirely correct that they haven't been shown any direction in life. Listening to that interview, their entire focus is the financial gain of working and no mention at all of the other benefits associated with working. Personal development, social interaction and pride are other reasons that people continue to work, even if that job only paid a small amount more than benefits.

There are far too many people within our society that don't value their work/job/career. That one element of your life enables you to live, eat, buy stuff, take holidays etc.

I think that a lot of it comes from the background that they've grown up in. Neither of them have seen parents working whilst they were younger really from reading that article.

It does get me down though that people are getting benefits for doing nothing really.

I work in a college, have done since i was 16 as an apprentice, if the girl had wanted to work in childcare she could have done something similar, starting off earning a pittance as i did but then eventually if you prove your good at the job you usually get taken on which is what happened to me, i now have a reasonably paid job which i enjoy, have studied on various courses to get qualifications and worked hard to get where i am, it annoys me that they are sitting at home just being given money and are also expecting to get a council house.

Also working in a college i know that if she wanted to complete the childcare course that she was studying then she would get it pretty much for free, she might have to pay an admin charge which at the college where i work is about £15. Same for him, he's claiming benefits, if he enjoys fitting windows he could go to college too and get some proper qualifications in construction or something similar which would give him a better chance of getting a job, even though there's not many about at the moment.

I know people that live on benefits, H's family being some of them and most of them live in comfort have decent enough houses/cars, but then they make sarcastic comments if me and H have a weekend away or something new for the house. That drives me up the wall, we work bloody hard for the money that we earn, we have no debt other than the mortgage and if we can't afford something we don't have it, where as there are some people that just sit there taking what the government will give them and think nothing of getting out and getting a job.

Sorry, that's turned into a bit of a rant but people claiming benefits when there is no reason for them not to work does annoy me. Surely getting out to a job even if the money is crap is better than sitting around all day doing nothing. Even if the money is crap you're gaining experience of working life which might help should a better paid job come along.

Amen to your last paragraph Chids, couldn't have put it better myself!

Increasing minimum wage significantly would, imo, lead to more companies employing illegal immigrants as they wouldn't be able to afford min. wage.

In this case, these people would have had double the money they now have through working, roughly, if I read that correctly. If that isn't an incentive, just how much do they want to earm. Also, the girl dropped out of a college course, but it doesn't say whether there were genuine reasons beyond not wanting to go. In fact, it is impossible to get any useful or meaningful info out of that, they're just disadvantaged people who haven't a clue what to do for the best, getting no help as far as I can see.

L
xx

I can understand why cesual work through agencies, where you can get laid off with no notice, or turn up and there's no work etc would be terribly disspiriting. But, as others have pointed out, how else do you get experience that will enable you to find a better job?

I'm also surprised that no one has pointed out the slightly scary fact that it's always the people with zero qualifications and motivation and somewhat low intelligence who want to "work with children".